As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to these users is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may vary with respect to the type of information handled; the methods for handling the information; the methods for processing, storing or communicating the information; the amount of information processed, stored, or communicated; and the speed and efficiency with which the information is processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include or comprise a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
A group of information handling systems may be networked together, and managed from a common node. In one example, a group of blade servers can be managed through a single chassis management controller. The chassis management controller manages a pool of medium access control (MAC) addresses, and it is desirable for each blade server to be assigned a MAC address that is virtual, and thereby persistent. If a blade server in the network is replaced, it may be desirable to assign to the replacement server the MAC addresses associated with the replaced blade server, thereby allowing the replacement blade server to seamlessly operate with the network and the security features of the network. Within each server, the MAC addresses of the server are maintained in the LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) of the server.
To provide a virtual MAC address to the LOM of the server, the system BIOS of the blade server must retrieve the MAC addresses from the chassis management controller and pass those MAC addresses via a command line protocol interface to the LOM. The string commands of the command line protocol interface are passed to the LOM through the option ROM of the LOM. If the option ROM of the LOM is not initialized or is not otherwise available, it may be difficult to pass the MAC addresses to the LOM. In addition the difficulty of providing MAC addresses to a LOM of a server, the use of a command line protocol interface to pass data to a device having an option ROM presents challenges if the option ROM is not available. Similarly, it is often difficult to pass configuration information to any embedded device that includes an option ROM, if the option ROM is not initialized or is otherwise not available. Similarly, for any embedded device in which configuration information is passed to the device through the option ROM of the device, it may be difficult or impossible to pass configuration information to the device if the option ROM of the device is not enabled.